Study: How to take the “urban pulse” of a city

Cities are dynamic, not static grids, and urbanization is a "spiky," cyclical, and asynchronous process.

See full article...

 

[spasm]

As the quote goes, 'a city is a battlesuit for surviving the future'

 

[msadesign]

This report has the feel of an Ars pseudopod testing some fresh waters, and as a professional land planner, it's quite welcome. Thanks, Beth.

 

[urbanCTO]

As the former CTO of a large city, this is fascinating, obvious, and, well, interesting. It certainly explains why being in Hong Kong, Chennai, and Hyderabad last week was so caffeinated compared with the usual haunts.

 

[lp0_on_fire]

You could give my local municipality all the information in the world and they're still going to insist on "mixed-use" development when there is zero demand for another square foot of retail or office space for miles in any direction and twenty year old developments have not been fully absorbed.

We could just build badly needed housing, but noooo... we're building live-work innovation hubs and check out these renderings of nordic women and european market SUVs on some bullshit Telluride knock-off looking street some urban planners in Denmark came up with.

So instead, nothing gets built, model train nerds have garrisoned a centrally located storefront for their train layouts because it costs them almost nothing and developers are hoarding land waiting for a changing of the guard.

 

[Great_Scott]

It's interesting to view cities through this kind of lens.

I'm curious to see what will happen in the future, as Western cities are a constant pull of amenities and conveniences with a simultaneous push of regulations and taxes.

Over time, I don't see a positive diagnosis for most cities without a fresh source of immigration as the world population is trending downwards. Then again, with less people to support the passive maintenance costs might trend down as well, which could encourage centralization.

 

[dobrien75]

It's nice to get data and analysis about something that is just a vibe about a city

Here in Melbourne, at least in the locales I haunt, the city feels like it is humming right now. Lots of infrastructure builds, uplift in village (suburb shopping/socialising) areas, a buzzing CBD. etc

Travelling to other cities and things can just feel tired, off in some way. Boring perhaps? I won't name names though, because that is a little rude

 

[Unclebugs]

The part of this study that I concur with is the concept that different cities develop and grow differently. Born and raised in Brooklyn, I found myself under a state of constant stress which I feel every time I go back to visit. Despite that feeling, I still marvel at all the amazing places within its boundaries: Central Park, MoMA, AMoNH, Bronx Zoo, Brooklyn Botanical Garden, Gateway National Recreation Area, et cetera. El Paso, TX, where I've lived since 1978, is about the same land area or less with about five percent of the the Big Apple's daytime population wrapped around the southern tip of the Rocky Mountains and I feel no stress. Both cities are international port cities: one air and maritime, the other air and terrestrial. One city is a big salad bowl of second languages and cultures, the other abuts the second most populous Spanish speaking country in the world. The only human activity adding stress to El Paso are the idiots in our capitol putting up walls. If you look at the crime statistics before Bush put up the first wall and afterwards there is no change, and now that Trump has added to it, there is still no change. The concept of equilibrium also makes sense to me as NYC has reached a fairly stable population. It seems to be about 8 million and has held steady for the past 60 years. El Paso has also seemed to hit a stable point of around 700,000 while Ciudad Juarez at about 1.5 million continues to grow rapidly where foreign investment has resulted in a doubling of the population in the last 30 years.

 

[chaos215bar2]

You could give my local municipality all the information in the world and they're still going to insist on "mixed-use" development when there is zero demand for another square foot of retail or office space for miles in any direction and twenty year old developments have not been fully absorbed.

We could just build badly needed housing, but noooo... we're building live-work innovation hubs and check out these renderings of nordic women and european market SUVs on some bullshit Telluride knock-off looking street some urban planners in Denmark came up with.

So instead, nothing gets built, model train nerds have garrisoned a centrally located storefront for their train layouts because it costs them almost nothing and developers are hoarding land waiting for a changing of the guard.

Sounds like your municipality is doing mixed use wrong?

The point is to build at a minimum housing and retail in proportion to what's needed. Unless the problem is that everyone in the area only shops at mega-chains, in which case perhaps some small business incentives could help?

Mixed use really is vastly more pleasant (and healthy) to live in vs. gigantic housing developments with zero retail where you have to drive to do anything, but you have to get the incentives and proportions right.

P.S. A storefront dedicated to model trains sounds fun! You do need some retail to go with it, but it sounds like the perfect draw for kids. Overpriced retail spaces that keep out this kind of more whimsical use of space also aren't necessarily healthy or something to strive for.

 

[SubWoofer2]

The mosaic data portrait of each city would be expected, arising as it does from measurement of output data points arising from myriad social and economic behaviours and processes at micro level. It'd be infrequent but predictable that from time to time a single macro driver would dominate as input. Covid, or (in Melbourne's case) poor economic management that saw the western half of the CBD shuttered in 1995. A long journey before turning this work into a predictive model for livability -assuming cities for people and their social and economic behaviour is a goal - but it should be doable.

 

[bthest]

And of course they're plagiarizing Jocelyn Burnell's pulsar signal visualization.

Stay classy Dubai.

 

[Dean C. Rowan]

Sometimes I read the bibliographic references to studies like this before digging into the substance. I did not expect to find references to Lefebvre, Mumford, Harvey, Elster(?!), Saarinen... Props to the researchers for anchoring their work to old(er) urban planning and design scholars. (Elster's a philosopher who has done work in game theory and probability.) Two planners who came to my mind are Kevin Lynch, whose The Image of the City, published in 1960, by its title alone represents the traditionally static approach to analyzing urban form; and Christopher Alexander's Notes on the Synthesis of Form (1964), which maybe anticipates this dynamic approach. You tell me. His appendix 2 begins, "We face the following specific, purely mathematical problem. Given a system of binary stochastic variables, some of them pairwise dependent, which satisfy certain conditions, how should this system be decomposed into a set of subsystems, so that the information transfer between the subsystems is a minimum?" I think he's talking about the problem of design here, not a way to measure changes over time. Anyway, the appendix concludes with a paragraph beginning, "These and other methods have been programmed for the IBM 7090, and are described in full elsewhere." He drops an endnote reference to papers published in 1962 and 1963. All of which only goes to show the richness of the scholarly record in these matters involving human interactions with objects in the world.

 

[CardinalChunder]

Sounds like your municipality is doing mixed use wrong?

The point is to build at a minimum housing and retail in proportion to what's needed. Unless the problem is that everyone in the area only shops at mega-chains, in which case perhaps some small business incentives could help?

Mixed use really is vastly more pleasant (and healthy) to live in vs. gigantic housing developments with zero retail where you have to drive to do anything, but you have to get the incentives and proportions right.

P.S. A storefront dedicated to model trains sounds fun! You do need some retail to go with it, but it sounds like the perfect draw for kids. Overpriced retail spaces that keep out this kind of more whimsical use of space also aren't necessarily healthy or something to strive for.

I wouldn’t bother engaging with that person. Their rant about Telluride and Danish planners is bizarre. The fact that they mentioned “European market SUVs” indicates that their post is gibberish.

I’ll unpack a little of what is there. They say “nothing gets built”, there isn’t enough housing, and that developers are land banking. They just described many American burbs that are zoned for single family homes only. I suspect wherever they live there’s a small “mixed use” core where some apartments and retail are grudgingly permitted, but nobody goes there because everyone drives to Walmart.

 

[lp0_on_fire]

Sounds like your municipality is doing mixed use wrong?

The point is to build at a minimum housing and retail in proportion to what's needed. Unless the problem is that everyone in the area only shops at mega-chains, in which case perhaps some small business incentives could help?

Mixed use really is vastly more pleasant (and healthy) to live in vs. gigantic housing developments with zero retail where you have to drive to do anything, but you have to get the incentives and proportions right.

P.S. A storefront dedicated to model trains sounds fun! You do need some retail to go with it, but it sounds like the perfect draw for kids. Overpriced retail spaces that keep out this kind of more whimsical use of space also aren't necessarily healthy or something to strive for.

It isn't a question of doing it wrong, they have just spent the last thirty or more years pursuing commercial and retail development for which there is no demand and trying to link it to housing, so the result is just that very little housing is getting built because developers aren't interested in adding to the inventory of vacant commercial space. I don't think you could get an apartment building approved of any description without ground floor retail.


There are basically two factions that dominate the area, the families who have been out here for a hundred years since it was a railroad resort area. And the former hippies who turned up here in the sixties and seventies and then returned as well heeled boomers who want everything to be the way they think they remember it.

But the one thing they agree on is a shared delusion that this area is something, anything other than drive till you qualify exurbia. Which it has been for decades. They want to believe that this can be a boutique resort town again, which is ridiculous.

The train dudes can afford to keep their layouts there because there is absolutely nobody interested in leasing the space on commercial terms. To the best of my knowledge they're paying nothing but the cost of insurance and utilities.

 

[Uncivil Servant]

There are basically two factions that dominate the area, the families who have been out here for a hundred years since it was a railroad resort area

I believe that the original term for those "railroad resorts", back when the railroads had the power of airlines and oil companies combined, was "factory towns". The cost of moving raw goods in was cheap, but the cost of moving anything, especially people, out from the town to the coast was incredibly expensive...except for the railroad owners.

Hence the landowning families and neo-feudal politics. Can't imagine why the middle class knowledge workers, skilled tradespeople, and small business owners have little to no presence, the Industrial Revolution just moved the Deep South further West.

 

[lp0_on_fire]

I believe that the original term for those "railroad resorts", back when the railroads had the power of airlines and oil companies combined, was "factory towns". The cost of moving raw goods in was cheap, but the cost of moving anything, especially people, out from the town to the coast was incredibly expensive...except for the railroad owners.

Hence the landowning families and neo-feudal politics. Can't imagine why the middle class knowledge workers, skilled tradespeople, and small business owners have little to no presence, the Industrial Revolution just moved the Deep South further West.

The "factory town" wasn't so much the railroad as the forestry operations, but they didn't survive the great depression.

 

[Veritas super omens]

Cities...IMHO, nice places to visit*, but I wouldn't want to live there.

*some cities...others I wouldn't even want to visit.

 

[Drang]

You could give my local municipality all the information in the world and they're still going to insist on "mixed-use" development when there is zero demand for another square foot of retail or office space for miles in any direction and twenty year old developments have not been fully absorbed.

Urgh. Zoning. A decent idea destroyed by regulatory capture.

 

[SubWoofer2]

Sometimes I read the bibliographic references to studies like this before digging into the substance. I did not expect to find references to Lefebvre, Mumford, Harvey, Elster(?!), Saarinen...

Harvey is in my pantheon. Ars is a great place!

 

[DeeplyUnconcerned]

So… this sounds like interesting work, but it also kinda sounds like “we put a bunch of effort into quantifying these data but we couldn’t find any useful patterns in it”. Is there a path towards anything predictive here, or are the data effectively just noise?

 

[dobrien75]

Is there a path towards anything predictive here, or are the data effectively just noise?

perhaps is could be useful as a broad classification tool, hopefully based not on cultural or ethnic metrics. How do the flows of urban pulse compare between cities and what might that indicate for planning etc

 

[LG11]

Sometimes I read the bibliographic references to studies like this before digging into the substance. I did not expect to find references to Lefebvre, Mumford, Harvey, Elster(?!), Saarinen... Props to the researchers for anchoring their work to old(er) urban planning and design scholars. (Elster's a philosopher who has done work in game theory and probability.) Two planners who came to my mind are Kevin Lynch, whose The Image of the City, published in 1960, by its title alone represents the traditionally static approach to analyzing urban form; and Christopher Alexander's Notes on the Synthesis of Form (1964), which maybe anticipates this dynamic approach.

Agreed. It is an interesting paper, especially because they did root it in Lefebre's work on rhythmanalysis. About the only thing that I'm a bit more critical about is the opening statement that "ubanization is traditionally measured as a static outcome". I don't think that this is the case, most urban planners (and scholars in urban planning) know full well that urbanization is a process that is not static. In fact, stability is a process too (it is the reproduction of the same). I also have questions about the case selection, with Dubai in particular being an example of an 'unnatural' rhythm mostly fueled by petrol dollars and speculation. That said, this is a very enjoyable paper. Thanks for discussing it here, otherwise I might never see it.

 

[LG11]

So… this sounds like interesting work, but it also kinda sounds like “we put a bunch of effort into quantifying these data but we couldn’t find any useful patterns in it”. Is there a path towards anything predictive here, or are the data effectively just noise?

I think it depends also on the cases that are bunched together. The current set up works as a proof of concept. For more rigorous testing of rhythms, they would have to group more similar cases first (e.g., a group of mega-cities, a group of ordinary cities, grouped by geographies and jurisdictions, etc.)

 

[AlbatrossMoss]

So… this sounds like interesting work, but it also kinda sounds like “we put a bunch of effort into quantifying these data but we couldn’t find any useful patterns in it”. Is there a path towards anything predictive here, or are the data effectively just noise?

I may be hallucinating, but it sounds like they found patterns of activity that should have been expected, but were not properly described?

From TFA:

There are sharp, short-lived spikes in activity, not smooth continuous growth.

So it's like how babies grow. Interesting. Genuinely interesting. Should have been obvious, admittedly. And this connects to the whole idea of populations in ecosystems, modeled by the logistic distribution. The cumulative of the logistic distribution being especially useful — like in the activation of artificial neurons. Which, obviously, models a "population" of artificial neurons connected to the dendrites, and provides a good threshold for activation.

And reading this article has slightly altered my perception of my hometown. It feels slightly more alive. If studies like these end up giving us better vocabulary when talking about cities, we may end up loving them more, and spending more time thinking about them as "living beings".

Edit: expanded a thing, for clarity.
Edit2: I used an "em" dash, but I am not an LLM. Don't you dare say anything about my "em" dash.

 

[clb2c4e]

I can't help but wonder that if no two city is the same, and none of them develop the same way using these metrics that these metrics are just picking up a bunch of noise.

Then, I did the classic of not reading the study so perhaps there is something groundbreaking I'm missing here.

 

[bebu]

I would have thought an EEG [brain electrical activity] would have been a better analogy than an ECG [cardiac.]

Non·periodic cardiac activity not usually a sign of vitality.

There is a fair bit of research and software developed to analyse brain waves which might be interesting to apply to urban historical data. Cities do seem to be subject to epileptic seizures at various times in their history and most are definitely bipolar.

 

[MrWalrus]

the world population is trending downwards

No it's not. The world population is trending upwards. The rate of change in the population is trending downwards, but even if it continues to do so, the world population won't peak until around the 2080s, and will be over 10 billion at that point.

 

[wrecksdart]

So instead, nothing gets built, model train nerds have garrisoned a centrally located storefront for their train layouts because it costs them almost nothing and developers are hoarding land waiting for a changing of the guard.

Honestly, well done to the "model train nerds". Plus the building owners deserve some credit for even entertaining the idea.

 

[xeroks]

You could give my local municipality all the information in the world and they're still going to insist on "mixed-use" development when there is zero demand for another square foot of retail or office space for miles in any direction and twenty year old developments have not been fully absorbed.

So instead, nothing gets built, model train nerds have garrisoned a centrally located storefront for their train layouts because it costs them almost nothing and developers are hoarding land waiting for a changing of the guard.

those empty storefronts with low rents do - or could - have a purpose: they're the kind of resource that encourages innovation.

I used to live in a popular area. There had been a history of interesting shops, but rents went up alongside the area's popularity, and those interesting shops were gradually turning into chain restaurants and cafes or would simply go empty.

Occasionally a shop would come up under a scheme where it was inexpensive for 6 or 12 months. For those months, some interesting new business would open up. But then usually shut down and move to a cheaper area. But without that initial start in a high-footfall area, it wouldn't have been viable.

 

[Lexomatic]

Zhu et al. got their data from the NASA Harmonized Landsat and Sentinel-2 databases to analyze new construction, repairs, improvements to infrastructure, green space expansions, and demolitions [...] Their analysis revealed three distinctive “vital signs” for monitoring cities. First, urbanization is “spiky”: There are sharp, short-lived spikes in activity, [...] Second, urbanization is cyclical and non periodic: There are distinct phases of building/expansion [...] Finally, urbanization is asynchronous: [...]

As paraphrased, I don't see the import of this work. An area has already been identified as a city, construction activity is tracked over a span of years, and hey, it doesn't occur at a constant rate. The null hypothesis would be "this activity is random, and randomness creates clusters."

"Pulse of a city" usually refers to phenomena on a much shorter time scale, with obvious periodicity: commuting (daily rush hours) as measured by private vehicle traffic and public transit riders; public service activity at other hours (rubbish collection, street sweeping) which happens in phases across districts; population in the central business district (high Monday to Friday, low on weekends); population in entertainment districts (high in the evening and on weekends). External events (heat waves, snowstorms, transit strikes) will change those phenomena in predictable ways.

The metaphor "vital signs" has very poor correspondence, IMHO. In a human, vital signs are heartbeat, respiration, blood pressure, temperature, brain waves, etc. This paper describes one phenomenon (construction) and identifies patterns in it. In medicine, there's a phenomenon (heartbeat) and different patterns that are diagnostic of sleep, inactivity, exertion, distress, etc. -- they're predictive: "if this mild cardiac arrhythmia continues, the patient can't participate in a marathon." Does this study establish any correlations or causations?

 

[GenericAnimeBoy]

Visualization of Dubai’s rapid expansion as a glowing “urban pulse.” Credit: Zhe Zhu/GERS Lab

Oh, I thought it was new Joy Division album art.

 

[mariupolo]

It isn't a question of doing it wrong, they have just spent the last thirty or more years pursuing commercial and retail development for which there is no demand and trying to link it to housing, so the result is just that very little housing is getting built because developers aren't interested in adding to the inventory of vacant commercial space. I don't think you could get an apartment building approved of any description without ground floor retail.


There are basically two factions that dominate the area, the families who have been out here for a hundred years since it was a railroad resort area. And the former hippies who turned up here in the sixties and seventies and then returned as well heeled boomers who want everything to be the way they think they remember it.

But the one thing they agree on is a shared delusion that this area is something, anything other than drive till you qualify exurbia. Which it has been for decades. They want to believe that this can be a boutique resort town again, which is ridiculous.

The train dudes can afford to keep their layouts there because there is absolutely nobody interested in leasing the space on commercial terms. To the best of my knowledge they're paying nothing but the cost of insurance and utilities.

So, unlike the vast majority of American municipalities that have very little mixed-use zoning and impose building single-family homes and only that if you want to build much housing at all, even though there would be demand for more dynamic and interesting mixed-use neighborhoods with things like corner stores... your municipality has the opposite problem, that it's been desperately trying to build mixed-use neighborhoods but there is no demand for nothing like housing?

Either there are major missing pieces to this story (like, this is a small part of a car-dependent wasteland created by single-home-only-zoning in the first place, for instance), or it's so remarkable that I'd like to know more about this place that is like an upside-down average USA town.

 

[goblinski]

...If it doesn't have a pedestrian zone, if it doesn't smell like coffee in the morning, and if no river runs through it - it's not a city...

Old adage from an old book in my neck of the woods.
Those are signs, and they are three

 

[skillfullymalicious]

So, unlike the vast majority of American municipalities that have very little mixed-use zoning and impose building single-family homes and only that if you want to build much housing at all, even though there would be demand for more dynamic and interesting mixed-use neighborhoods with things like corner stores... your municipality has the opposite problem, that it's been desperately trying to build mixed-use neighborhoods but there is no demand for nothing like housing?

Either there are major missing pieces to this story (like, this is a small part of a car-dependent wasteland created by single-home-only-zoning in the first place, for instance), or it's so remarkable that I'd like to know more about this place that is like an upside-down average USA town.

I can confirm that this is actually a thing, at least in some areas. I'm in a mid-sized American city, where there is a zoning mandate of some kind that in areas with a certain level of density or a certain project size (not 100% sure on the exact criteria), ground-floor commercial space is required and you can't just build a five-floor residential-only apartment building without a variance.

My neighborhood, which is fairly walkable, is mainly composed of small, closely spaced turn-of-the-century SFHs but also has patches of older commercial real estate and interspersed larger apartments (mostly newer development). I live in one of several large, newer buildings in a row that have a variance for this mixed-use requirement or started construction before it came into effect. Their ground floors are mostly taken up by some amenity space as well as several walk-up units. There are also other large developments in the general area which didn't get a variance, and have very large, totally empty commercial spaces taking up >90% of their ground floor. Restaurants and shops are located primarily in the existing commercial corridors very near by, with established foot traffic and (I assume) cheaper rent (smaller, older spaces).

Large empty spaces in buildings that aren't bringing in rent revenue are certainly increasing the project cost without a corresponding benefit. If there was no mandate, that space could have been built as housing units that would increase the housing supply and bring in more rent to amortize the building cost. It's not a common problem, but it is an unintended consequence that's reducing supply (when that "extra" space is the difference between a development being profitable or not, so it doesn't get built) in some specific locations.

 

[dobrien75]

I can't help but wonder that if no two city is the same, and none of them develop the same way using these metrics that these metrics are just picking up a bunch of noise.

Then, I did the classic of not reading the study so perhaps there is something groundbreaking I'm missing here.

That is the entire point of the study. i.e. given the wall of data about the history of a city, how can we analyse it to produce some classification and patterns.

 

[lp0_on_fire]

I can confirm that this is actually a thing, at least in some areas. I'm in a mid-sized American city, where there is a zoning mandate of some kind that in areas with a certain level of density or a certain project size (not 100% sure on the exact criteria), ground-floor commercial space is required and you can't just build a five-floor residential-only apartment building without a variance.

That is the deal here. You have to build the minimum amount of retail or commercial to get anything built, if you do more than the minimum you can get density bonuses. If you build space suitable for a supermarket or hotel you can have above-ground parking and a larger setback.

Part of their scheme the European consultants came up with calls for a continuous public indoor and outdoor mezzanine the length of the strip with further retail and amenities, there are presumably further incentives for buying into that.

But it's all moot, none of this will ever be built and the area be just as dead twenty years from now.

 

[mariupolo]

I can confirm that this is actually a thing, at least in some areas. I'm in a mid-sized American city, where there is a zoning mandate of some kind that in areas with a certain level of density or a certain project size (not 100% sure on the exact criteria), ground-floor commercial space is required and you can't just build a five-floor residential-only apartment building without a variance.

My neighborhood, which is fairly walkable, is mainly composed of small, closely spaced turn-of-the-century SFHs but also has patches of older commercial real estate and interspersed larger apartments (mostly newer development). I live in one of several large, newer buildings in a row that have a variance for this mixed-use requirement or started construction before it came into effect. Their ground floors are mostly taken up by some amenity space as well as several walk-up units. There are also other large developments in the general area which didn't get a variance, and have very large, totally empty commercial spaces taking up >90% of their ground floor. Restaurants and shops are located primarily in the existing commercial corridors very near by, with established foot traffic and (I assume) cheaper rent (smaller, older spaces).

Large empty spaces in buildings that aren't bringing in rent revenue are certainly increasing the project cost without a corresponding benefit. If there was no mandate, that space could have been built as housing units that would increase the housing supply and bring in more rent to amortize the building cost. It's not a common problem, but it is an unintended consequence that's reducing supply (when that "extra" space is the difference between a development being profitable or not, so it doesn't get built) in some specific locations.

Interesting. This does sound like doing mixed-use developments wrong. If there is already mixed use of space in the neighborhood, imposing minima of commercial space in new developments does seem counterproductive. It would be more sensible to have flexible use, commercial if there is demand for it, otherwise residential.

But this is a walkable city neighborhood that already has mixed use, which seems different from what lp0_on_fire was talking about. A municipality where people want housing and only housing and the only mixed-use neighborhood built sits largely devoid of businesses sounds bizarre. It was called exurbia, so I suspect it is in fact in the middle of a car-dependent housing-only wasteland that's not very walkable, in which case the problem may not be too much mixed use and not enough housing, but the other way around, at least on a scale slightly larger than that one neighborhood. But maybe I'm wrong and people living there really are fundamentally uninterested in going to a local cafe, bar, convenience store, specialty shop or whatever.

 

[clb2c4e]

That is the entire point of the study. i.e. given the wall of data about the history of a city, how can we analyse it to produce some classification and patterns.

Ok, so I did go skim the study now. And the point is:

"Urban Pulse allows researchers to link urban processes to socioenvironmental outcomes, and the remote sensing diagnostic approach can provide critical early warning signals for urban stress and enables targeted interventions to improve urban resilience and sustainability"

My scepticism stands that this study can do that given they find that urban
"development consists of uncoordinated, episodic surges at the neighborhood scale"

 

[Lil' ol' me]

"Welcome to my Ted Talk on Urbanization, where I talk about our study on urbanization, where we study how to make better cities for everyone. This includes affordability, equity, sustainability, & livablity, where everyone has a voice and change is driven by the citizens. Let me start by talking about ...

Dubai.

And then...

Shenzen."

OK, folks, this is not useful information for urbanists trying to make better cities. This is oligarchs (capitalist & communist) trying to use the all-important data, data, data to make it easy to create justification for making urban spaces that increase GDP & profits for oligarchs.

I mean, Dubai & Shenzen? C'mon. Immigrant slaves. Government funding & mandates for everything.

Wake up, urbanists. This study is a farce. This is how we/they create & justify terrible outcomes.

 

[Lil' ol' me]

"people have to spend half their income on their mortgage..."

"people live in tiny spaces, such as four adults sharing a one-bedroom apartment..."

"a handshake building [where you can open a window and shake hands because] there's another building two feet away"

-- Steve Inskeep of NPR visits Shenzen, China

"this cycle of abuse, marked by systemic injustice and exploitation, has not gone unnoticed. Its reverberations reach far beyond the UAE's borders, resonating globally as a reminder of the fragile state of human rights in the pursuit of economic gain."

-- Human Rights Research article